Posts by Joe Davis

To render images at interactive framerates, engines have to approximate the behavior of real world phenomena – such as shadows – rather than simulating them. As real time rendering techniques continue to push towards photorealism, the cost of these approximations approaches the point of diminishing returns. Although traditionally seen as a complex offline process, ray tracing is becoming an increasingly … Continued

We’ve mentioned in a recent blog post how maintaining presence is key in virtual reality systems. Rendering applications at high framerates (60, 90 or 120 Hz depending on the Head Mounted Display’s maximum refresh rate) with low motion-to-photon latency is an important part of achieving it. In this article, I’ll explain how the OVR_multiview extension can be used to reduce … Continued

At the end of January, I was at the ISART Digital in Paris to join a panel discussion titled New Graphics APIs discussion panel at the dawn of Vulkan. The meeting was organized and chaired by Christophe Riccio from Unity and focused on the Khronos Group’s new Vulkan graphics and compute API. Vulkan is a next-generation API for grapics and … Continued

Knowing where to look for help is half of the battle when it comes to optimizing your application. This blog post is intended to ease your 3D graphics development process by not only directing you to relevant learning resources, but also explaining what analysis tools are available and detailing the various ways to contact our developer support team. Know your … Continued

As part of our PowerVR SDK v3.3 development, we chose to refine navigation in PVRTraceGUI – our OpenGL ES analysis utility. This work consisted of many minor tweaks to simplify the interface. It also included a bigger change – a brand new search engine. One of the most important features of the new, streamlined Find dialog is its powerful regular … Continued

Since its release, our PowerVR Graphics SDK and Utility roadmap has always been strongly influenced by the developers that use it – both indie and AAA. We’ve collected feedback over email, on the forums and, of course, in person! The downside is we have a very good understanding of a specific developer’s requirements, but not of the PowerVR Insider community … Continued

As the CPUs and GPUs in mobile devices have become more powerful and devices with one or more high-resolution screen have become ubiquitous, the demand for complex interactions with the graphics driver has increased. In this blog post, I’ll discuss what multi-thread and multi-window rendering means to developers, and I’ll describe if and when these techniques should be used in … Continued

So far in this series, I’ve described what PVRTrace is and outlined the core features of PVRTraceGUI. In this post, I’ll detail the advanced features of our analysis tool that simplify the process of identifying misuses of the API, redundancies & potential performance bottlenecks. Pixel Analysis: Frame Summary Selected Pixel A pixel can be selected by clicking on it in the … Continued

PVRTraceGUI makes OpenGL ES debugging easy. In this post, I’ll detail the core features of the tool and explain how they can be used to optimize and debug the API calls made by your application. The Call List The ‘Call List’ is the core of PVRTraceGUI – it allows you to see how the graphics API was used during recording. … Continued

PVRTrace – the PowerVR OpenGL ES analysis tool inside the PowerVR Graphics SDK – simplifies the process of identifying errors, redundancies & performance bottlenecks in your application’s graphics API calls. In this blog series, I’ll detail how the tool works, how it can speed up your OpenGL ES development process and what features have been added to our latest release … Continued